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60Michael J. Zimmerman, The Concept of Moral Obligation:The Concept of Moral ObligationEthics 109 (2): 468-470. 1999.
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214Review of mark Schroeder, Slaves of the Passions (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (4). 2009.I assess Schroeder's book Slaves of the Passions and isolate some grounds for concerns about the overall position.
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8Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy Volume 4 (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2018.This is the fourth volume of Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. The series aims to publish some of the best contemporary work in the vibrant field of political philosophy and its closely related subfields, including jurisprudence, normative economics, political theory in political science departments, and just war theory.
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1153Well-Being as the Object of Moral ConsiderationEconomics and Philosophy 14 (2): 249. 1998.The proposal I offer attempts to remedy the inadequacies of exclusive focus on well-being for moral purposes. The proposal is this: We should allow the agent to decide for herself where she wants to throw the weight that is her due in moral reflection, with the proviso that she understands the way that her weight will be aggregated with others in reaching a moral outcome. I will call this the "autonomy principle." The autonomy principle, I claim, provides the consequentialist's best prospect for…Read more
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502Morality and virtue: An assessment of some recent work in virtue ethicsEthics 114 (3): 514-554. 2004.This essay focuses on three recent books on morality and virtue, Michael Slote's 'Morals from Motives', Rosalind Hursthouse's 'On Virtue Ethics', and Philippa Foot's 'Natural Goodness'. Slote proposes an "agent-based" ethical theory according to which the ethical status of acts is derivative from assessments of virtue. Following Foot's lead, Hursthouse aims to vindicate an ethical naturalism that explains human goodness on the basis of views about human nature. Both Hursthouse and Slote take vir…Read more
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97Parfit's Case Against SubjectivismIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, volume 6, Oxford University Press. 2011.I argue that Parfit's On What Matters does not make a compelling case against subjective accounts of reasons for action.
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53Morality, Normativity, and Society, David Copp. Oxford University Press, 1995, xii + 262 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 14 (2): 349. 1998.
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759Subjectivism and blameCanadian Journal of Philosophy 37 (5). 2007.My favorite thing about this paper is that I think I usefully explicate and then mess with Bernard Williams's attempt to explain how his internalism is compatible with our ordinary practices of blame. There are a surprising number of things wrong with Williams's position. Of course that leaves my own favored subjectivism in a pickle, but still...
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38From Valuing to Value: A Defense of SubjectivismOxford University Press. 2016.David Sobel defends subjectivism about well-being and reasons for action: the idea that normativity flows from what an agent cares about, that something is valuable because it is valued. In these essays Sobel explores the tensions between subjective views of reasons and morality, and concludes that they do not undermine subjectivism.
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494Advice for Non-analytical NaturalistsIn Simon Kirchin (ed.), Reading Parfit, Routledge. pp. 153-171. 2017.We argue that Parfit's "Triviality Objection" against some naturalistic views of normativity is not compelling. We think that once one accepts, as one should, that identity statements can be informative in virtue of their pragmatics and not only in virtue of their semantics, Parfit's case against naturalism can be overcome.
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66Sumner on WelfareDialogue 37 (3): 571-. 1998.In this paper I criticize the way Sumner marks the subjective/objective divide and the way he argues for subjective views of well-being.
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157Desires, Motives, and Reasons: Scanlon’s Rationalistic Moral PsychologySocial Theory and Practice 28 (2): 243-76. 2002.
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Well-Being and ConsequentialismDissertation, University of Michigan. 1997.There are two common assumptions about well-being that I am especially concerned to dispute in this dissertation. The first assumption is that differences in kinds of prudential values can be reduced to differences in amount of prudential value. That is, that differences in the qualities of values can reliably be reduced to mere differences in quantity. The second assumption is that well-being is the appropriate object of moral concern. Consequentialist moral theories typically argue that morali…Read more
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169Pleasure as a Mental StateUtilitas 11 (2): 230. 1999.Shelly Kagan and Leonard Katz have offered versions of hedonism that aspire to occupy a middle position between the view that pleasure is a unitary sensation and the view that pleasure is, as Sidgwick put it, desirable consciousness. Thus they hope to offer a hedonistic account of well-being that does not mistakenly suppose that pleasure is a special kind of tingle, yet to offer a sharp alternative to desire-based accounts. I argue that they have not identified a coherent middle position
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921Disagreeing about how to disagreePhilosophical Studies 168 (3): 823-34. 2014.David Enoch, in Taking Morality Seriously, argues for a broad normative asymmetry between how we should behave when disagreeing about facts and how we should behave when disagreeing due to differing preferences. Enoch claims that moral disputes have the earmarks of a factual dispute rather than a preference dispute and that this makes more plausible a realist understanding of morality. We try to clarify what such claims would have to look like to be compelling and we resist his main conclusions.
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597Pain for objectivists: The case of matters of mere tasteEthical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (4). 2005.Can we adequately account for our reasons of mere taste without holding that our desires ground such reasons? Recently, Scanlon and Parfit have argued that we can, pointing to pleasure and pain as the grounds of such reasons. In this paper I take issue with each of their accounts. I conclude that we do not yet have a plausible rival to a desire-based understanding of the grounds of such reasons.
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1IntroductionIn David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge University Press. 2009.
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416Against direction of fit accounts of belief and desireAnalysis 61 (1): 44-53. 2001.The authors argue against direction of fit accounts of the distinction between belief and desire.
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791The impotence of the demandingness objectionPhilosophers' Imprint 7 1-17. 2007.Consequentialism, many philosophers have claimed, asks too much of us to be a plausible ethical theory. Indeed, the theory's severe demandingness is often claimed to be its chief flaw. My thesis is that as we come to better understand this objection, we see that, even if it signals or tracks the existence of a real problem for Consequentialism, it cannot itself be a fundamental problem with the view. The objection cannot itself provide good reason to break with Consequentialism, because it must …Read more
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90What we owe to each other, T. M. Scanlon, the Belknap press of Harvard university press, 1998, IX + 420 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 16 (2): 333-378. 2000.
Syracuse, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Value Theory |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Social and Political Philosophy |